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Naval Battle League 2016-2018


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I have begun work on a fully modular Space Combat System that can be configured to any role required.  Want a small maneuverable frigate with some light rocket pods?  Sure.  Want a medium escort vessel with guided torpedoes?  No problem.  Want a multi-hulled carrier/support ship with the supplies to support an entire fleet?  You can do that too*!

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It does seem that I have hit a delta V wall with this design though.  I'm using Poodles and aerospikes as my engines, which have pretty awesome ISP for LFO engines, but with the armor plating and structure, I can't seem to get much above 3,000m/s, and that's before I add weapons.  I m trying to keep it practical, such that it could conceivably be used in a Career save as an awesome looking interplanetary ship.  Will I maybe have to go with a NERV focused engine module for this, and run a hybrid system for interplanetary ejections from the Kerbin system?

*We accept no responsibility for computers melted while exploding a multi-hulled ship composed of many modules.  All ungodly creations of overwhelming size operated at user's risk.

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5 hours ago, ShadowGoat said:

Huh. Either @Spartwo has an outdated game or I have an outdated game. I can’t update so I think it’s you.

Nor can I.

6 hours ago, panzer1b said:

>snip<

Vectors have the thrust advantage and higher control authority. They also share fuel type with Vernors. In addition equal thrust is required to counteract the mass cannon...Which is a vector.

Edited by Spartwo
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Ayy it's great to see that this thread is back. Been building a new fleet from the ground up. Can't wait to have some more battles.

 

On 20/01/2018 at 2:16 PM, panzer1b said:

I think this thing can easily match or exceed anything else out here that has similar mass and part count values.

If that's an open challenge, I'll gladly take you up on it :).

Edited by quasarrgames
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22 hours ago, quasarrgames said:

If that's an open challenge, I'll gladly take you up on it :).

I dont really do battles at this time since im way too busy in real life (and doing a battle just takes way too long for me).  really only way i could prolly do one was maybee 1-2 turns over each weekend, but even that is questionable as some weekends im too busy for any computer stuff anyway...

 

Maybee in the future, but not now.  Still, you are free to use my ships and mess with em to see if they work well for you (heck, if you or anyone else wants to you can even use my ship hulls/weapons in your fleets).

Edited by panzer1b
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Recently, I’ve been experimenting with ship mounted railguns. After spending a bit of time getting a prototype working, I fitted one to my latest warship, the MCS-14 Materis, and fired on one of my stations. There were a few problems. Firstly, the recoil forces tore the ship apart.

screenshot460.png

Secondly, the slug exploded shortly after leaving the barrel, for no apparent reason. I suspected this was because the way of the slug had been stacked together and offset into one length, looking fine on the outside but stretching and applying uneven force when fired. I’m not sure if that was the problem, but using a 0.65m heatshield as a base for the gear pushers solved it. With this fix in place, I fired it at my station again.

Unexpectedly, the heat shield plate increased the projectile speed by an order of magnitude, from about 720m/s to 8.8km/s.

screenshot459.png

Mutual destruction. In a happy coincidence of tick rate physics, the slug actually registered hitting the station, causing large explosions. The slug itself continued undamaged, travelling along its merry way out the solar system.

screenshot464.png

After this great success, I set about trying to minimise recoil, increase accuracy, and decrease the speed to reasonable levels of phasing avoidance. Setting the dampers and springs to a tenth of their previous strength brought down projectile speed, while also bringing recoil down to non-damaging levels, and I’m currently working to increase accuracy.

I think these have a lot of potential, as fairly light, 0.65m weapons with much more power than I-beams, and much easier to use and build than other specialist weapons like MAC cannons. Once I have a single shot variant working perfectly, I’m going to try and build a reloading system.

Edited by MiffedStarfish
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I feel like one of the best weapons would be a landing gear gun, but my testing has revealed a few problems.

Firstly, while the shell can fire at excessive speeds, mine was actually pretty weak but still, it tends to put the shell on a deorbit trajectory that curves so sharply it often missed the target entirely.

Secondly, with a high quality one, phasing is going to almost always be a problem.

Sigh. If only KSP calculated collisions better.

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8 minutes ago, ShadowGoat said:

I feel like one of the best weapons would be a landing gear gun, but my testing has revealed a few problems.

Firstly, while the shell can fire at excessive speeds, mine was actually pretty weak but still, it tends to put the shell on a deorbit trajectory that curves so sharply it often missed the target entirely.

Secondly, with a high quality one, phasing is going to almost always be a problem.

Sigh. If only KSP calculated collisions better.

Most of the speed issues can be solved by lowering the spring strength. I’m sure with testing and knowledge of the projectile speed, you could probably work out a formula for offset from the target for distance. I’m going to be doing some more testing soon.

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3 hours ago, ScriptKitt3h said:

I definitely hope you can make some breakthroughs with this, it's about time 1.25m ASMs got dethroned as the king of stock antiship weaponry.

Ive done some experiments with "leg-guns" (they arent really railguns, unless you make it multistage leg system where the projectile gets pushed by multiple legs before leaving ship but even that i call a leg-gun), but all of them resulted in inconsistency and also extreme vulnurability to incoming fire.  Any component of the gun is damaged or destroyed and its gonna misfire the next round, while SRMs (ibeam+sepatrons) remain useable even after a few are shot off (i dont think i have a ship with less then 6 of those, some with as many as 20).  Railguns are also a tad unaccurate (granted this isnt an issue as 90% of the time you fire at point blank), and have either low firepower OR massive phasing issues leading to very unreliable results (sometimes it doesnt even interact, sometimes it hits a crititcal thing, sometimes it knocks off a single engine, sometimes it vaporizes the ship).

 

Also, i doubt anything will truly dethrone 1.2m ASMs since they are guided, can be made extremely powerful due to mass and size (les sphasing problems and easier to hit something with less accuracy vs 0.6m crap), and are generally fairly consistent with what they do vs other weapons.  Second most effective weapon (in my opinion) is the ibeam, since its super small and lightweight, packs a punch, and can be comfortably brought on smaller vessels like starfighters and gives them just enough firepower to neuter or even kill a 100t cruiser if you fire accurately at the right locations.  Maybee leg-guns will be a thing once perfected (and i thing ill try and make a new model over weekend), but i still doubt itll ever be as practical as SRM spam or properly used 1.2m torps.

 

That said, i do think that disposable leg-cannon arrays offer a good method to have low mass low part count ibeam spam without the inherent issue of having to actually use sepatrons and kill the part counts.  I might actually try and make a tank built up around a leg gun since its the perfect application for it.

Edited by panzer1b
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On 16/02/2018 at 5:47 AM, MiffedStarfish said:

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with ship mounted railguns. After spending a bit of time getting a prototype working, I fitted one to my latest warship, the MCS-14 Materis, and fired on one of my stations. There were a few problems. Firstly, the recoil forces tore the ship apart.

[snippity snoo]

That is a beautiful ship. What painting mod did you use? I tried to get DCK to work with no success.

Also remade some new ships:

mrvoGth.png

Neeson class. 75 parts, 31 tons, 6 heavy missiles.

D6ilMEh.png

Bullock class. 150 parts, 59 tons, 16 heavy missiles. 

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Well, one thing that i never understood is why a miniscule change to a ship makes it go from fodder to indestructible?  As in move a ibeam around by 1-2 ticks in the local offset and it makes the core virtually unkillable vs killable at a certain angle by a given warhead.  Also, a single strut can make or break a ship as well, literally a night and day difference when you remove/move/add a strut and where its located makes ships go from fodder to insanely hard to kill.

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Finished development of my IV class AKS frigate, and im now moving on to other vessels (i have 3 more unique core layouts im trying and seeing whether they are any good).  Compared to teh previous iterations, i fixed the ugly looking rear and cockpit (i really really like how i made the wings go around the cockpit without actually clipping into it, better resilience and better looks).  I also upgraded the G5 torpedoes by switching the warheads from hybrid APS (armor piercing shrapnel) rounds to pure AP, and while its a bit worse against unarmored targets, its not like i have any reason to use a 1.2m torp on a frighter or the like anyway so the increased lethality to heavy warships is a plus (new model is actually comparable offensively to the old 10t zeke's super-torp that ive been using as a test of good armor protection).  All in all, total offensive loadout is 8 SRMs, 4 drones, and 2 G-5sm, enabling it to engage virtually anything from fighters to capitals, and since the weapons are varied, no one specific style of armor will render the ship ineffective (as ive found in my own development, you cant make a ship resilient to every single form of weapon, if it resists RT-5s, itll die to ibeams, if it resists ibeams, itll die to heavy torps, ect).

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Also, i think ive made an accidental discovery regarding part clipping, and in specific, when to do it and how to do it so it improves resilience (and results in near indestructible core structure).  I need to do some more testing, but it seems that if the ibeams that branch off the core are clipped just slightly (as in they attach on the opposite side youd expect them to) it results in a stronger core.  Gotta do some more testing to prove this, but sofar all my ships that use that layout are stronger and less prone to luckshot kills.

 

I should have some more time over the upcoming weeks for KSP since im not doing any more overtime, so ill see whether i can make any more progress with armor development.  Maybee ill even have a bit of time for a battle, but no promises (and i need to come up with a few more ships as i only have 2 modernized variants, the SK-II and SK-IV)...

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@panzer1b, after hours of testing pretty much every kind of missile on your SK-IV, i think i can confidently say that ship is near indestructible. Except for rootkiller shots which happen about 5% of the time, the ship can soak up dozens of tons of weaponry which would kill other conventional-armored ships several times over. pretty much any part that collides with it is destroyed, no matter the mass or speed, and the armor just doesn't budge. The only things that showed some signs of success were rooter missiles specifically meant to phase through armor to hit the root part, or strapping a cargo bay to a missile.

When i first started using cargo bay armor i knew its partially-indestructible hitboxes were powerful, but i haven't realised how powerful until now.

It seems clear that until gear weapons work (even then i doubt it'll be enough), armor has greatly surpassed weaponry here. 

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10 hours ago, quasarrgames said:

That is a beautiful ship. What painting mod did you use? I tried to get DCK to work with no success.

Thanks! It looks better when it isn’t being ripped apart by kinetic energy. :) The mod was the newest version of DCK, though, so not sure what was breaking it.

Those ships look really nice, I like the wings on the Bullock Class.

I had a bit of time to test the MCS-14 Albion, (previously Materis, but abandoned after finding out that was a paint manufacturer) and thankfully it seems fairly resistant, at least to 0.65m phasing Missiles like the G3. The main issue was the repeated destruction of the 2.5m fuel tank, so I’ll have to try and move it into the fuselage more, or at least single point it so it doesn’t take the other main fuel tank with it. I’ve also developed a missile about half the size of the G3, called the G7, which seems to have roughly the same or slightly less the damage than its older brother, but much lighter, allowing for 8 of them to be stored, using the same method panzer used with the mk2 bays. The main problem with the Albion is it’s weight, at around 30t higher than I’d like. The bulk of that comes from the main fuel tank though, so maybe I should make an ion version.

I need to test panzer’s new ship as well.

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